Hello, A way of using intermittently connected machines is to use them as leaves which only store and provide data instead of nodes with store, provide data and route requests. Meaning right now all freenet nodes are equal and should have a permanent internet connection; a 'leaf' could be useful even if it is only intermitetly connected, like through a dial up account; however when it turns on, it would look for a few permanent nodes and tell them that it can supply the data behind a list of keys, that it can store an extra amount of data; but, that is all. When it turns off, it tells the nodes it has contacted that it is no longer available. When one of the contacted nodes gets a request for a key, it searches its own hard drive, if it's not there it then looks to see if any intermittent node can handle the request and if it's not there it then sends the request along. This would be useful in three ways, one is that this makes the extra storage and bandwidth capacity of intermittently connected machines available, people who want to keep certain information always available can store it on their own hard drives, never deleting it and in pro censorship areas, the permanent nodes could rely entirely on the intermittent leaves for data, storing none on their own, so they wouldn't have any objectionable data on them. Censors would be forced to go after more individuals, rather than a few high bandwidth servers. This can be seen as dividing the functions of a freenet node into searching / routing and storing / transfering, which right now every node has both, into two sections. The typical freenet node could now either search, search and store or store. From a programming perspective, since the current nodes already do all of this, writing leaf nodes could be kept in the same cvs tree, as long as their interfaces are clearly divided between searching and storing. A search only node would be useful in pro censorship places so that freenet can continue even if a few machines are outlawed. A search and store node would be the current freenet node, useful in free information places. A store node would be useful for people, who have intermittent connections, usually operated from their homes. Cheers, Enrique -- Get your firstname@lastname email for FREE at http://Nameplanet.com/?su _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freenet-dev
